Ecommerce Gift With Purchase Strategy (Hint: 1,636 Orders Generated)

Chris Von Wilpert

Last Updated Nov 02, 2018

EHPlabs is a health and fitness eCommerce company with a mission to spread the knowledge of fitness to the world. They sell health and fitness products for men and women to help them lose weight, gain muscle, and take their performance to the next level.

When Arnold Schwarzenegger saw the EHPlabs team at the Arnold Sports Festival in Australia, he said: “This is the most muscular crowd of any sports and fitness expo in the world!”

So you better believe EHPlabs health and fitness products work. But sometimes people still need a little incentive to make that first order.

In business, this marketing strategy is called Gift With Purchase (GWP). If you’ve ever been to your local shopping mall and bought a significant amount of beauty, makeup or cosmetics products and got a gift with purchase, that’s the GWP marketing strategy in action.

But the strategy doesn’t just work for beauty products; it can work in any industry, no matter what you sell. Here is how EHPlabs is using it:

When you add any item in EHPlabs store to your cart, you get taken to this cart page.

If you try to leave the cart page without clicking “Proceed to Checkout” or “Continue Shopping,” you get shown the EHPlabs GWP offer:

Giving away this funnel keyring for free has resulted in 6,905 email conversions and 1,636 orders where people used the code in their order. The average Sumo popup converts at 2.3%, yet this popup had over 10x that with a 26.24% conversion rate for capturing emails for the free keyring offer.

The emails EHPlabs collected were added to their email subscriber database, where they sent a welcome email with a link to where people could enter their personal details:

When people click on the “HELP US GET TO KNOW YOU!” link, EHPlabs asks them for information including:

Date of birth

Gender

Fitness Goal (weight loss, muscle gain, etc.)

Once EHPlabs has those details, they can segment those customers further to try to enhance open/click rates with customized email automation sequences depending on the customer’s information. This give EHPlabs the opportunity to show new email subscribers content and products directly related to their goals.

The 23.70% conversion rate EHPlabs got from email subscriber to sale made this one of the most successfully promoted coupon offers for EHPlabs.

Here are how the stats on the free GWP popup break down:

26.24% conversion rate from viewing the popup to email opt-in

23.70% conversion rate from email opt-in to purchase

This means that the overall conversion rate from viewing the popup to purchasing was 6.22%. The 76.30% of people who signed up for an email but did not purchase were added to an email automation sequence.

The EHPlabs team learned that a popup’s success often depends on the landing page where it appears. The success was the checkout placement, because a website visitor’s mindset was already at the purchasing stage. The promise of a relevant gift (did you notice how the funnel is used with the products they sell?) helped increase the conversion rate.

EHPlabs designed the discount code so the customer would receive the free funnel keyring only with the purchase of another product. Since the product was so small, there was no need for an additional shipping cost, so the customer truly received a product at no additional cost.

If you’d like to replicate EHPlabs’ free GWP popup for your eCommerce store, follow these steps.

Set your Design to Sumo’s Confident template (or pick your own template and customize it to match your brand’s style).

On your Success Popup (the popup people see after entering their email) add a new Text widget and enter the code people need to use.

Set your Visibility to Manual Mode and set it up for when the User Leaves. Add a rule to only show the popup on your /cart and /checkouts page (or whatever pages that is for your store). Also, add a Show rule for Cookie named cart exists. This will allow you to target people that add an item to your cart and leave anywhere else on your site.

Connect to your email service provider so you can store the emails you capture.

That’s all there is to it. Now you know how to convert like EHPlabs, pick a product you’re willing to gift with purchase and try it in your own business.